Joost, the P2P video service once known as the Venice Project, has been in …

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Joost, previously known as the Venice Project, has been generating hype ever since the project was announced last July. The P2P video streaming service entered private beta mode in December of last year but only recently seeded a small number of beta versions of the Mac software to the beta community. Over the weekend, however, Joost finally opened up the private beta to Mac users with the 0.8 version of their software.

Joost for OS X is only compatible with Intel-based Macs right now, which means that beta testers can't test it out on older PPC hardware. I've been running it on my 2GHz MacBook with 1.5GB of RAM. Installation was a breeze, although I encountered an issue post-installation where multiple copies of Joost were showing up in my dock at once, and I received an error message saying that a copy of Joost was already running. Upon reading the list of known issues in this release, this appears to be a common problem, as well as the Joost icon "flickering" in the Dock during startup. I don't seem to have a flickering issue (if I am interpreting it correctly), although when I do attempt to start up the program, it shows up in my dock, then disappears as if it has quit, and then reappears a few seconds later to start up the program. Is this flickering? I'm not sure.

Startup of the Joost program itself is a little pokey, another issue that the Joost team acknowledges. The time it takes to start it up varies, however. The first time I opened Joost, the program took well over 10 seconds to start, but attempts after that took less time. My second startup took about 6 seconds, and my third about 7 seconds. I wasn't doing anything significantly different on the computer any of those times, so it's unclear where the variance lies and how it affects Joost's startup times.

Joost's default setting is fullscreen mode, and navigating through the somewhat minimalist interface is simple and easy to figure out without much guidance. The layout of the menus and options appear to be exactly the same as on the Windows client of Joost, down to the transparency of the menus over the top of whatever videos you're watching—which can be distracting at times and hard to read, depending on what's going on in the background.

The "My Joost" menu in particular—a section that allows the user to customize the "interface" a bit by sticking little Dashboard-like widgets around on the screen—can be difficult to read with its low transparency setting.

Joost offers users the ability to chat with others who are watching the same channel as you via a tiny chat room that you can access from "My Joost." I was watching MTV's "Staying Alive," which apparently only two other people were watching at the time. They were not very chatty. Users can also sign onto either Google's GTalk or some other Jabber service through Joost to IM friends back and forth while watching a show. I tested out this functionality for a bit, but soon found my screen was getting crowded. On one hand, I liked that Joost offered the the ability to do something other than watch a show, but on the other hand, I found the extra options to be distracting. These same options are available on the Windows client.

All during this time, however, performance of the app and the video streaming appeared to work as advertised. I only experienced one video hiccup over the past several days, and it was only for a second. Other than slow startup times, the software itself wasn't laggy at all. It was very responsive to my mouse clicks and keyboard commands (those that worked, that is), and otherwise offered a mostly seamless user experience. Speaking of keyboard commands, the list of known issues acknowledges that they are "not completely working yet" for the Mac and to "try using the Windows shortcut if the Mac shortcut does not work." This doesn't always work when, say, your Mac does not have an "alt" key, but it's the thought that counts. That said, most of the keyboard commands worked for me, although I never did get the "resize window" command to work.

Joost works in window mode the same way as it works in fullscreen mode, with the slight twist that not all text displays correctly when in window mode—another known issue with this release. The menu items themselves appeared to be normal, but many of the display titles—such as menu titles, and the title of what I was watching—were crunched.

All in all, the Mac client is a near replica of the Windows client, with the exception of the aforementioned flaws (most of which are already known): text spacing issues, slow startup times, and odd dock behavior. Joost provided a good Mac experience, with no real navigational or functionality problems to speak of. The only complaint about Joost—which is more of the service than the Mac client—would be that there is currently a very limited selection of content for beta testers to watch. If other studios and networks follow Viacom's lead in putting their (old and new) content onto Joost, however, the service could very well take off. The other significant limitation is the ability to watch video content from Joost on a TV set instead of a computer—something that people with HTPCs could easily do right now, but an average Internet user would likely not. While Xbox Live Video has the Xbox 360, iTunes will (soon) have the Apple TV, and Unbox will have the TiVo, where will Joost fit into the new lineup of video services on the TV?

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui